Originally Posted by
Bertrand
its sort of funny, I give zero fucks if someone doesn't say hi to me, unless its like my one-in-a-million crush (and even then this is only because I really want their specific attention), but people have on occasion chided me for ignoring everyone whenever I come into a room (opening for a restaurant not saying hi to people just starting work, etc). I just think this is run #200 through the same routine so its not like anything is new. I think the response to that would be "yeah but you're supposed to integrate greetings into that routine"--but that's precisely what bothers me, I don't want greetings to be lumped into the equivalent of setting up a resturant. to me if I greet someone I will actually talk to them for whatever time is convenient for us both; to me if you just lump them in with task #15 in the process on getting through the day the entire point of interaction to begin with is lost, or at least really degraded. just being around people we all know whats up (or at least I used to assume this) thus just being there is a greeting. we see eachother, we're working together, everything is as it should be. and then when we talk its because we have something to really say or because we genuinely want to. this idea that we're going to pretend to be genuinely interested in everyone with a set of token gestures degrades the fact that I am, in fact, genuinely interested in most people. people can tell anyway, like whats in these silly greetings, that isn't totally blown away by the first person who shows actual interest. its like night and day. I don't even know how people can stand rote greetings in light of that. to me whats intolerable more than anything is the complete lack of sincere interest behind the norm. of course not all greetings are procedural norms without meaning, but enough are that I think the person making the exception in order to make greetings more than a ministerial gesture should be appreciated as in some way keeping the whole thing from becoming a lifeless set of polite robots running their algorithms on eachother. I do think this is the case, no one gives me too much shit. at the same time I genuinely feel for the people who can't track the environment and want a "check in" so to speak via norms. I guess im just throwing the other point of view out there